Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • There and Aware

      “If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you. The nights are still there and the winds roam through the trees and over many lands.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

      Walking the pup last the last few nights, quietly celebrating her birthday in our meandering walk of stargazing and lawn sniffing (we each have our ritual), I replayed some of the day in my head while the universe spun above like a kaleidoscope of wonder. The waxing crescent moon the last couple of night stuns and delights. Hints of auroras in the air, not reaching us but worthy of diligent glances nonetheless. Venus and Orion have shared the same sky, creating a sky that made the pup’s long investigative sniffs seem shorter.

      The pup appreciates my stargazing, for it gives her time for her own night’s work. Sometimes she’ll lead me off onto a lawn if I’m especially distracted by the sky. Just a reminder that she’s there and aware, so maybe I ought to get my head out of the clouds a bit more. That’s been the goal the entire time, of course. Awareness in the moment—away from all that isn’t here and now. No earbuds, no screens, no replaying the hits and misses of the day. Simply being present on our walks together, until it was time to head back in once again.

      Perhaps we’ll meet again tonight, to do it all over again? The sky will surely offer something completely different to wonder at as the day slowly fades into memory. How long have we been doing this? Three years with this pup, longer with our old friend that preceded her. How many dogs will we have in a lifetime? Such calculations aren’t worth considering. Not when we have this one, now, and such a beautiful sky above and lawns full of smells only a dog could love.

    • Be Generous

      “The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.” — Kalu Ndukwe Kalu

      Generosity is more than beginning with the end in mind. Legacy may or may not be important to us in any given moment of decision (clearly, so many choices in a lifetime don’t involve how we’d like to be remembered), but something within us leads us to or away from generosity. As the not-so-generous might ask, what’s in it for us by being generous?

      The answer is literally beyond the grasp of the selfish among us. Generosity is reaching beyond the self to touch the lives of others. The act of being generous connects us to others, physically or spiritually. One generous act ripples beyond our self. In this way we grow into someone far beyond the self. We touch upon the infinite.

      I may never have a wikipedia page covering the highlights of my life, but the donation I make to someone’s GoFundMe or letting someone turn into traffic are examples of quietly extending my reach. Leading by example in a world that often feels too self-absorbed and selfish. It’s what we do here and now that brings light into the world.

    • Fluidity

      “When you cut water, the water doesn’t get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside you; you’ve got solid illusions inside you; that’s what bumps against nature, that’s where you get hurt, that’s where the pain comes from.” —Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Be fluid and the world becomes easier to navigate. Be rigid and you’ll soon find you keep running into things that contradict all that you believed. ’tis easier to flow through life open to whatever the day brings. If we find we don’t like what we encounter, flow in a different direction. We get to reinvent ourselves with every step if we break the mold of identity that holds us in place.

      We know that there are plenty of people who are rigid and unmoving. The “my way of the highway” types. Many of these people rise to power and influence history. But they’re often weak at the core; predictable, playable, easily distracted by a skilled tactician. They may be powerful, but they’re vulnerable at the same time. When we are creative, fluid and aware, we can navigate our way past them. The river always finds its way to the ocean.

      “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
      Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
      ― Bruce Lee

      Does fluidity mean that we don’t stand for anything? Is that which we stand for a sign of rigidity? This is an exercise in what is essential for us in our lives. Is our identity locked in family or career or accolades? Is it honor? What is honor but a rigid belief in how we will navigate the world? I’m not suggesting we be dishonorable, merely that we know why we are rigidly holding to a standard. Our why is always what we will flow to, once we get beyond the obstacle that is blocking us from proceeding there.

      “Wherever you go, there you are.” — Thomas à Kempis

      Where are we? What is holding us in this place? Sometimes it’s forces beyond our control, but usually it’s something within us. When we know what the obstacle is, we may then find a way around it. Fluidity is simply openness to change. We are here, facing this. Is this a dam or will we find a way through or around whatever is keeping us here? More change is on the way (it always is), and flow is inevitable. Are we truly open to it?

    • A Day Away

      “If you repeated what you did today 365 more times, will you be where you want to be next year?” — Kevin Kelly

      We are all creatures of habit. The question is, are our collection of daily habits taking us where we want to go? Put another way, if consistent action leads to transformation, have we chosen the right actions to take? If we’re delighted with the answers, then by all means keep doing the same things. But if there’s a gap between who we want to become and who we are now, the answer lies in changing our days. Today is as good a day as any.

      Last summer I embarked on a journey called 75 Hard. It was exactly what it said it was going to be, and it ended with radical transformation. Sure, I lost a lot of weight, read some books I’d been leaving off to the side a little too long and found myself overall far more healthy, but the key lesson was in time management. We all have the same 24 hours in a day—how do we fill those hours? If I learned anything while doing a structured lifestyle program, what we subtract is as important as what we add.

      Fast forward eight months and fragments of that lifestyle change remain. One step back picked up in that time is a nagging injury that I’m working to correct with physical therapy. So it goes. Others have it far worse and still do what must be done. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that excuses fill the void where action once thrived. We are always a day away from healthy lifestyle change. We just have to make that change today and not tomorrow. To act today as if our lives depended on it. Doesn’t it?

    • A Higher Standard

      “The people they want to ingratiate themselves with, and the results, and the things they do in the process. How quickly it will all be erased by time. How much has been erased already.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      It’s easy to get caught up in the madness in the world. The evil-doers and the zealots and the profiteers. What are they but a constant flow of distraction and detraction drowning us in nonsense? We must build a resilient mind that shrugs off the insults and affronts. We are here for greater things than a circus clown show.

      Knowing this, what are we waiting for? Why succumb to such distraction when time is growing short? A higher standard awaits us still.

    • The Rich Lens of Attention

      The dream of my life
      Is to lie down by a slow river
      And stare at the light in the trees—
      To learn something by being nothing
      A little while but the rich
      Lens of attention.
      — Mary Oliver, Entering the Kingdom

      Restless and productive, that’s this life—knowing there’s work to be done. If not us, then who? Blame it on my GenX tendencies. I’ve been fighting it all of my life. An entire generation has fought it all of their lives. We’re all complex contradictions of motivation and awareness. Or maybe that’s just me lumping the lot of them in with me just to save face.

      Even writing this (even writing this!), I turned to my work laptop to dash off an email that’s percolated to priority. How can one linger with poetry or walk quietly amongst the trees when the mind is full of the minutia of a productive life? We must learn to say enough is enough in our lives, before it all floats away to illuminate the dreams of other, more open minds.

      The thing is, every day is our lesson in living. We choose to be aware and attentive, or we swim deeper into the tumultuous red ocean fraught with ravenous sharks and whirlpools that drag us downward into the depths of other people’s priorities. Alternatively, we can swim to calmer waters, away from the chaos that would consume us, and discover a new life.

      Decide what to be and go be it. Our lives will be the richer for it.

    • The Ideal Life

      “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” — Mark Twain

      Lately, I’ve spent a lot of quality time with some good books. I’ve had less of that quality time with good friends, but we make it count when we reconnect. Life is what we make of it, and maintaining connection is a large part of a great life.

      Friends amplify experience. Going out and experiencing life solo has it’s perks, but try multiplying what we experience by one and see what it equals. Those friends also help us live longer, more vibrant lives. If increasing one’s health span is the ultimate goal, relationships with others is clearly the path to be on.

      Have I sold you on maintaining friendships yet? How about that sleepy conscience Twain refers to? Who else are we going to be foolish with than our friends? Who will know our stories, and keep them locked up in a vault only we can reminisce about? An ideal life is full of stories, whether we tell anyone else about them or not.

      (Happy Birthday, my friend)

    • Anything You Need

      You could have a steam train
      If you’d just lay down your tracks
      You could have an aeroplane flying
      If you bring your blue sky back
      All you do is call me
      I’ll be anything you need
      — Peter Gabriel, Sledgehammer

      When we witness change in other people, do we celebrate it with them or work to drag them back down to where they once were? Are we a trusted ally or a part of the problem they’re working to break away from? Now look in the mirror and ask, which are we to ourselves?

      We may quietly let things happen to us or be quite active in leading the charge. We have the agency to alter the outcome, if we use it. To go be a sledgehammer and ditch the old form for transform.

      Sure, this writer is carrying on about change again, but for a change, maybe act on it a bit more? Decide what to be and go be it. Just this once. Be anything you need. Doesn’t your life depend on it?

    • A Future Sky

      What shape
      waits in the seed of you
      to grow and spread
      its branches
      against a future sky?
      — David Whyte, What to Remember When Waking

      I saw a seal this morning, a dark shape floating quietly in the bay, unmistakeable, assessing the rising sun, perhaps, or more likely catching a breath before diving for breakfast once again. As with these things, the binoculars were handy but not the camera, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Walking down to try to catch another glimpse, I saw nothing and everything all at once. Let’s go with everything this morning.

      My mind is full of change lately. This blog is full of change lately. The same yet different.

      We cannot predict the future or our place in it, we can only choose a path and work towards that which we dreamed of becoming. Castles in the air, as Thoreau put it, must have a foundation. Work on that today. Tomorrow will unfold as it may.

    • Eggs and Tarragon

      We are creatures of routine, and I am no exception. I could begin every morning for the rest of my life eating eggs and tarragon, a scattered bunch of cherry tomatoes with an ice cold glass of water and a hot coffee to wash it all down. Boring? Perhaps. But well above the normal drive-thru breakfast of most Americans.

      The point is, when we find something that works really well for us, it helps to standardize on that thing, if only to eliminate having to think about one more thing in our days. To go on autopilot about breakfast allows me to focus more on the other things I have to get done today. It’s the taco Tuesday of the breakfast hour, and it works for me.

      Similarly, writing this blog first thing is habituated. As I write this I’m contemplating two large events happening later today that require a lot of brain power to execute properly. Now I only have so much of that brain power to offer, don’t I? It may have been better to defer the writing until after my busy day is done, but I’ve found that it has the opposite effect. When we disrupt our positive morning rituals, we move through our day feeling like something is off. And that simply won’t do.

      So what’s for breakfast? And more, how do we spend our golden hour before the day gets away? There’s no telling what the hours ahead will bring, but at least we’ve started with something we love. Bon appetite.